U.S. Considers ‘Deputizing’ Police for Marijuana Cases

U.S. drug officials, still struggling to deal with California’s newly approved medicinal marijuana law, said Monday that they are exploring ways to essentially deputize state and local officers to act as federal agents in seizing the drug and making arrests.

“Can state or local officials seize [marijuana] as contraband under federal law and turn it over to federal law enforcement? That’s the one we are looking most closely at,” said Thomas A. Constantine, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “It remains to be seen.”

But White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey conceded at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the administration is still “puzzling through” ways to get around Proposition 215, which legalizes the use of marijuana in California for medical purposes.

Since California approved the proposition Nov. 5, state and federal law enforcement officials--fearing soaring drug use as a result--have been trying to figure out how to circumvent Proposition 215 and use federal drug laws that prohibit the possession and sale of marijuana.

Washington’s pace in responding to the new law came under attack at the hearing. “The election was a month ago and the administration doesn’t have a plan,” said John Walters, a deputy director at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bush.

In particular, he scoffed at a repeated assertion by McCaffrey that the administration intends to collect data on the harm it predicts will come as a result of Proposition 215. “One thing they want to do is watch the body count in California,” said Walters. “Why don’t they prevent the body count in California?”

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The committee hearing was rife with denunciations of the initiative passed by 56% of the voters in California and an even broader measure approved in Arizona. McCaffrey, Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates and others decried the propositions as “a march toward drug legalization” and branded the well-financed campaigns to pass them a “cruel hoax.”

“This was not a grass-roots movement,” said Gates, who chaired the unsuccessful campaign to defeat the California initiative.

“If voters really knew what they were voting for, it would have lost.” The initiative backers “established a law clearly to reach the goal of legalization” nationwide, Gates said, adding that 75% of the $2 million spent on behalf of passing Proposition 215 was raised outside of California.

Gates also complained that the California law creates confusion about laws and enforcement policies on the federal, state and local levels. To solve that, he called on the federal government to bring suit against California and Arizona to overturn the ballot measures.

“Only then will we regain the ability to enforce a national drug policy,” Gates warned.

But specifics of what the administration plans to do about two state measures that run straight up against federal law were revealed only under questioning at the hearing.

Asked whether the Drug Enforcement Administration would step up efforts to prosecute marijuana possession in both states, administrator Constantine stopped short of promising any additional federal personnel.

But he said federal agencies are exploring how California and the federal government can work together.

In addition to exploring whether state or local officers can seize marijuana as federal contraband, he said, officials are investigating whether the officers could make an arrest on the federal government’s behalf. “At present, it appears they cannot,” he said, but indicated that the matter is not resolved.

“We are trying to solve 15 major agenda issues [concerning this] right now and are in such uncharted territory,” Constantine said. “ . . . Most Americans have not yet grasped the concept of what happened last month in California and Arizona.”

But constitutional law experts and an aide to California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren said afterward in interviews that it is not at all unusual for local law enforcement agents to arrest a suspect for a federal violation.

“What if local police happened to arrest someone for robbing a bank--a federal crime?” said John Copacino, director of the Criminal Justice Clinic at Georgetown University. “They don’t say, ‘Geez, this is a violation of federal statutes.’ They take them over to the federal court, turn them over and prosecute them there.”

Cross-deputizing is common in California, agreed Lungren press secretary Steve Telliano. He said the question is not whether the strategy is legal, but whether it would work, considering an already burdened staff of federal prosecutors that would have to shoulder the extra caseload.

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At the hearing chaired by Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, witnesses opposed to the initiative laid out a frightening possible scenario of school bus drivers smoking pot and marijuana crops growing in fields near schools.

Behind the scenes, there was talk that state leaders expect little help in the end from the Clinton administration, an issue that will probably be discussed today in Sacramento when Lungren is scheduled to meet with district attorneys, sheriffs and police chiefs from around the state to sort out Proposition 215.

“We don’t expect a damn thing from the Clinton administration,” one Sacramento aide said.

A lone voice invited to testify at the hearing in defense of the ballot initiatives disputed claims that voters were duped by slick campaigns.

Marvin Cohen, an Arizona lawyer and treasurer of Arizonans for Drug Policy Reform, said voters in his state were simply acknowledging that the nation’s $13.2-billion-a-year war on drugs has failed.

“Voters knew exactly what they were doing on Nov. 5,” Cohen said. “Today, Americans are understandably pessimistic about this country’s drug war.”

Also contributing to this report was States News Service writer David Phinney.